Activists demand trustee's resignation

From:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080306.wgilchrist06/BNStory/National/

CAROLINE ALPHONSO

Globe and Mail Update

March 6, 2008 at 5:31 AM EST

Social activists in an Eastern Ontario community yesterday demanded the resignation of school trustee Gordon Gilchrist, a former Conservative MP, over a letter he wrote to a local paper calling on voters to tell politicians to "turn off the immigration tap before it's too late."

The Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board in Peterborough condemned Mr. Gilchrist's remarks, and the trustee stepped down from a board committee. But Mike Ma, co-ordinator of the city's Community and Race Relations Committee, said it's not enough. He and several groups, including the Kawartha Muslim Religious Association, held a news conference yesterday to ask Mr. Gilchrist to resign as trustee.

"Most people in the Peterborough and the Kawartha community were quite disturbed by this letter," Mr. Ma said in an interview. "It would be a great injustice to the community if Gordon Gilchrist simply for the next few weeks flies below the radar and then survives making racist remarks and espousing racist beliefs."

In a letter to a local paper last month, Mr. Gilchrist said that "most" immigrants don't understand Canadian values and "bring their old-country feuds and hatreds to be paraded and re-fought on Canadian soil."

He then wrote that some of the 800,000 Muslims in Canada are Islamic extremists, Jamaicans settle scores using guns instead of the courts, Indian immigrants blow up an airplane to settle scores, and Sri Lankan Tamils use Canada as a source of funds for homeland rebellion.

"Why do we continue to delude ourselves that we are better off with a virtual 'open door' policy on immigration?" he wrote. "Do we not recognize that in addition to creating a modern 'Trojan Horse' situation, these quasi-Canadians cause Canada additional economic and environmental distress? ... Do they not take Canadian jobs?"

Mr. Gilchrist yesterday said he will not resign. "Why should I? I'm not a racist. There was nothing racist about my letter," he said.

Mr. Gilchrist said his letter was in response to another in the local paper about immigration policy. He said the examples he used are not unheard of. He said Canada has many "wonderful" immigrants of various races, but some are admitted through an immigration policy not in tune with the needs of the country.

"It wasn't a letter by a trustee on racism. It was a letter, as it turns out by a trustee, but also a citizen, a very-proud-of-this-country citizen, and I'm not going to let people who want to kill our soldiers go by unnoticed. If that makes me a racist, well then, put your own tag on it. But I deny it," he said.

Mr. Gilchrist was a federal politician in the early 1980s, but resigned in 1984 after being convicted of an income tax offence. This is his eighth year as a school board trustee.

After public criticism of the letter, Mr. Gilchrist wrote a second one stating that his remarks were his views on matters of citizenship and not racism.

The school board wanted no part of it. Last week, the board officially censured him for conduct "unbecoming of a trustee."